Turning Up the Heat in the Windy City

It's 8:30 a.m. and Dr. Elnora D. Daniel, president of Chicago State University, is already three hours into her day. She sits in her office, sipping green tea and preparing to face yet another full schedule of meetings and engagements that will continue at a steady pace until well after sundown.
Daniel spends the mid morning in meetings with the staff of Tempo, the student newspaper, as well as with members of her executive council. She then presents welcoming remarks at two different conferences held on campus, including Career Awareness Day.
Compared to the way her days usually begin, Daniel says this morning's schedule is relatively light. Despite her pre-dawn start and long string of appointments, Daniel, 58, appears to be full of energy, one of the three characteristics she says college presidents need, along with perseverance and courage. Possessing a turbo-charged spirit certainly is an asset for Daniel who, so far, has spent her presidential tenure pursuing an ambitious agenda of institutional improvements in the areas of academics, infrastructure and finance.
Long considered the stepchild of Chicago's public university system, Chicago State University had historically been allowed to languish, often going without badly needed resources, Daniel says. The university is situated on the South Side of the Windy City and serves a predominantly minority population.
One of Daniel's first orders of business has been to raise the admissions level, focusing on quality rather than quantity. Some consider the strategy a controversial move for a university that traditionally had more liberal admissions criteria that, according to one university official, were not strictly adhered to. One consequence of "raising the bar," however, is that the university has seen a 3 percent decline in enrollment.
"I'm not playing a numbers game," Daniel says. "I'm into providing a quality, value-added education for the young people that come through the doors of this institution. After 31 years of educating minority students, I know that there is a threshold that one must pass in order to be able to achieve a college education."
Daniel points to test scores as one indicator. The average ACT score of a CSU applicant is 19. (The average national score was 21 last year out of a possible score of 36.) Before Chicago State tightened its standards, many of its students had below-average scores.
"Some of the ACT scores of students admitted were not really scores that would allow them to have the wherewithal to achieve a university education," Daniel says. "So we have raised the admission level."
For example, students with ACT scores of 15 had historically been granted admission. However, the school now requires that students score at least a 17 on the ACT or at least 830 on the SAT [the national average SAT score is 1,000] and have a grade-point average of 2.0.
"Faculty are never going to be opposed to raising academic standards," says Dr. Phillip Beverly, president of CSU's faculty senate and assistant professor of political science. "But the problem was the process. Enrollment was impacted and there were no policies in place to address that."
Daniel says she's not worried about the decline in enrollment, but would like to maintain it at the current level of 8,000 students. In order to minimize attrition, the university has contracted national retention consultants Noel-Levitz to help develop a comprehensive enrollment management plan. Part of that process involves working with students who almost make the grade, Daniel says.
"We say to [under-qualified applicants], ‘We will admit you, but not now. Here's what you need to do. We found through our assessment that you have weaknesses in these areas. If you go to a community college, take care of these weaknesses and re-present yourself to this university, I will guarantee you admission.'"
But Beverly says there is a risk that as the university raises academic standards and improves academic programs, CSU still will not be able to go after the type of students that they want because of the school's history of being underfunded, adding that a declining enrollment in an enrollment-driven type of institution is an issue.
Dr. Charles Smith, who was associate vice president for student development during the administration of previous CSU president Dr. Dolores E. Cross and now is vice president for enrollment management and student affairs at Delaware State University, says the declining enrollment is not a negative. He supports Daniel's statement that many of CSU's students should have been enrolled at a community college prior to entering the university. Enrollment was approximately 10,000 during Smith's tenure. But he says the previous administration was also concerned about the quality of the student body and thought scaling it back to approximately 8,000-8,500 would have been more manageable.
Cross says although she had a wonderful experience at Chicago State, she faced many of the same challenges as Daniel — improving the student applicant pool; improving retention rates and communicating the university's mission to both the corporate and local community.
"The university is not as well known as it should be," says Cross, who is now president of Morris Brown College in Atlanta. "My biggest challenge was to make those in city and state government and the corporate community more aware of CSU."
Among other things, Cross and her administration were responsible for building the university's first residence halls and a new student center, as well as for holding the first Friends of CSU Award Dinner in 1995. Last September, the sixth annual dinner raised $1 million, making it the most successful fund-raising event in the school's history.
"From what I can see, the momentum is still there," Cross says. "I think [Daniel] has taken the institution to another level."
Daniel's plans for improvement don't stop with the institution's academic profile either. She is determined to improve the institution's financial and infrastructure profiles as well. According to university officials:
n Chicago State has had three successive years of balanced budgets in this administration after four successive years of deficits;
n The university has significantly improved its financial audits during the past three years, after several years of unacceptable audits. The Illinois Auditor General's Synopsis Report on Illinois' public universities stated that CSU had the second-best improved conditions of all the public universities in the state; and
n The university executed several significant financing and operations initiatives that have resulted in multimillion-dollar savings — $25 million bond refunding that saved $900,000, and an energy conservation initiative that will result in $1 million of guaranteed annual savings for the next 10 years. This initiative will also provide for a significant enhancement in environmental and aesthetic conditions in all of the university's buildings.
Through state funding, Daniel has been able to put a new computer on every faculty member's desk and approximately 400 computers have been installed in the university's two residence halls, with two computers in each room.
In order to do this, Daniel must spend a lot of time in Springfield, Ill., home of the state's General Assembly, the body that makes the final decisions about the state budget, to lobby on behalf of the university.
"I have to present the university's budget to the Senate and the House of Representatives and that takes a lot of time … making sure that Chicago State University, within a state that is very much dominated by the University of Illinois, gets its due, gets its piece of the pie, more or less…" Daniel says.
When Daniel was appointed president in 1998, she discovered that the university had not received funds from the General Assembly to be used for capital improvements in 30 years. Now, however, the university has funds from the General Assembly for a $35 million library; a $25 million convocation center; a $10 million renovation of one of the oldest buildings on campus; and $750,000 in planning money for a new child-care center.
Assisting her and the university in this effort is State Senate Minority Leader Emil Jones Jr., D-Chicago, a long time supporter of CSU who says he has a soft spot for this university that has often gone without. Daniel says having him as an ally has been significant for what she and her administration have been able to do.
"Chicago State University serves many Black students in Chicago, although it's not a traditional HBCU," Jones says. "It's always been treated like a stepchild. This is my attempt to make up for the shortcomings from the past."